Sterling Riggs keeps a small framed photograph above his workstation at Iron Age Tattoo on West Franklin Street — a black-and-white snapshot of his first apprenticeship shop, a cramped room above a pawn store that closed sometime in the late nineties. He points at it occasionally when new clients ask how long he’s been doing this. The answer is a long time.
Iron Age opened in 2003, and Riggs has been the constant through every shift the place has made — a move down the block, a renovation that added two more artist chairs, a pandemic that nearly gutted them. The shop now runs four resident artists and books guest spots from out-of-state talent a few weekends a month. But walk in on a Tuesday afternoon and it’s still mostly Riggs at his station, reading glasses pushed up on his forehead, sketching something for a client sitting in the chair across from him.
The interior is quieter than you might expect. No thumping music, no counter full of flash you feel pressured to buy into. The walls are covered floor to ceiling with framed reference pieces — American traditional, Japanese, blackwork, illustrative — but the display feels more like a working library than a sales floor. Riggs will tell you he doesn’t push any single style on people. He’s spent twenty-five years getting competent at most of them, which matters in a mid-sized city where your options aren’t endless.
His specialty, if you press him, is portraiture. Realistic faces, usually from photographs — family members, musicians, athletes. He’s done a few hundred of them over the years and takes real pride in getting the likeness right. Those commissions book out three to four months in advance. Walk-in work or smaller custom pieces can often get scheduled within a few weeks, depending on the artist.
Pricing runs roughly on par with regional averages — a small piece starts around $100 to $150, and larger custom work is quoted by the hour at $150 to $180 depending on complexity. Riggs doesn’t advertise a rate sheet because he says the honest answer is that every piece is different. He’ll talk through cost during a free consultation, which the shop does by appointment.
What makes Iron Age worth singling out isn’t any one tattoo style or price point. It’s the fact that Riggs has built a shop with actual institutional knowledge — the kind that comes from two and a half decades of tattooing the same community, watching trends come and go, and staying steady through all of it. He’s tattooed grandparents and their grandchildren. He’s done memorial pieces for people who lost someone they brought into this same shop years earlier. That accumulation of relationships with a city is rare, and it shows in the way people talk about the place.
The shop is on West Franklin, which puts it near the edge of the Franklin Street corridor — walkable from a handful of bars and restaurants if you’re making a day of it. Hours are Tuesday through Saturday, noon to seven most days, though they vary when a guest artist is in. Call ahead or check their Instagram, which is where they post availability and guest booking information.
Iron Age Tattoo isn’t trying to be the flashiest shop in the region. It’s trying to be the reliable one, the one you trust with something permanent. After twenty-five years, Sterling Riggs has mostly made that case.
